This information comes from (a) a list of 56 cleared prisoners released by the Justice Department in September 2012, based on the recommendations of the Inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009, and (b) a complete list of the task force’s recommendations, released by the DoJ in June 2013, which also identifies the 46 men recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial, and the 33 recommended for trials. There are also 30 additional Yemenis listed who were recommended for “conditional detention,” to be freed when it was decided that the security situation in Yemen had improved.

I have also included some additional information about the 71 men who were put forward for Periodic Review Boards in April 2013 — the 46 men recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial, and 25 of the 33 recommended for trials — after the list was secured through FOIA legislation by Jason Leopold in February 2014. For a list of the prisoners still held, and their status, see my prisoner list on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I co-founded with the US attorney Tom Wilner in January 2012.

This definitive prisoner list is part of an ongoing project (now in its ninth year) to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The first fruit of this research was my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon (US and UK), in which I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these prisoners, and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.

Between November 2007 and February 2009, I also published 12 online chapters telling the stories of over 250 prisoners that I was unable to include in the book (either because they were not available at the time of writing, or to keep the book at a manageable length), and since May 2007 I have written over a thousand articles about Guantánamo, for a variety of publications, expanding on and updating the stories of all 779 prisoners. In particular, I have covered the stories of the 224 prisoners released from Guantánamo since June 2007 in unprecedented depth. I have also covered the stories of the 29 prisoners charged in Guantánamo’s Military Commission trial system in more detail than is available from most, if not all other sources.

I have also endeavored to do the same with the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, covering the 63 cases decided to date in the District Court in Washington D.C. as thoroughly as possible (see Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List). 38 of these were originally won by the prisoners, although the D.C. Circuit Court then fought back, changing the rules, gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners, with the result that nine of those victories have been reversed or vacated, and the last 11 petitions (since July 2010) have been lost by the prisoners.

As a result of my dedicated work over the last eight years, this is the most comprehensive list ever published of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, providing details of the 614 prisoners who have been released (and the dates of their release), the nine men who have died, the one man transferred to the US mainland for a trial, and the 155 prisoners who are still held (including the prisoners cleared for release but not freed under President Bush, and those cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force), as well as those designated for prosecution or ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial.

The list provides links to my articles or online chapters telling the stories of over 400 prisoners, and also provides references for the chapters in The Guantánamo Files where their stories can be found, and, since the release of the WikiLeaks files, it also includes links to the 422 stories I have told to date, in the first 33 articles of a projected 70-part, million-word series, “The Complete Guantánamo Files.” To date, I have told the stories of the majority of the 89 prisoners whose stories were unknown until the WikiLeaks files were released, and have told the stories of all the prisoners released from 2002 to 2006, and some of those released in 2007. I am awaiting further funding before attempting to compete the project, which will, I hope, eventually be housed on its own dedicated website. For my introduction to the WikiLeaks documents, assessing their significance, see WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies.

It is my hope, as it has been since I established this prisoner list five years ago, that this project will provide an invaluable research tool for those seeking to understand how it came to pass that the government of the United States turned its back on domestic and international law, establishing torture as official US policy, and holding men without charge or trial neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial in a federal court, but as “illegal enemy combatants.”

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

And finally, as it is remains apparent that President Obama has failed to close Guantánamo as he promised, and that the men still held have been failed by all three branches of the US government, I hope that it also provides useful information for those still seeking to close Guantánamo, and to bring to an end this bleak chapter in American history. Since my last update in April 2012, just 13 prisoners have been freed, even though 77 of the remaining 155 prisoners have been cleared for release (all but one since the task force published its report in January 2010). Cynically, Congress tied the president’s hands, and the president, although possessing the power to override Congress, chose not to do so for reasons of political expediency. In addition, the Supreme Court also washed its hands of responsibility for the prisoners, leaving it up to the men themselves to force the world to pay attention to their plight and their despair by embarking on a major hunger strike in 2013, which led President Obama to promise to resume releasing prisoners, and releasing 11 men between August and December 2013, compared to just five men in the previous three years.

With Congress now having been persuaded to ease its restrictions on the release of prisoners, President Obama needs to push ahead with the release of the 77 men cleared for release — overcoming fears of instability in Yemen, the home of the majority of the cleared prisoners — and he also needs to speed up the review process for 71 other prisoners, and proceed to trials for the only other men — just eight in total — who have been charged and will face trials.

It is time to bring the terrible story of Guantánamo to an end.

Andy Worthington, London, March 7, 2014

How to use the list

In the categories below, ISN refers to the Internment Serial Number by which the prisoners are (or were) known and identified in Guantánamo, followed by the prisoners’ status (released, cleared for release, still held, or, in nine cases, deceased), their names (with just some of the many different permutations noted, in some cases), their nationality, and links to articles I have written about them, or which include references to them, or references to chapters in The Guantánamo Files. Links on the release dates feed into articles published when the prisoners were released.

Of the prisoners cleared for release, some, as indicated, were cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, others were cleared by judges in US courts, who granted their habeas corpus petitions, and 76 in total were cleared for release by the Obama administration’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed their cases in 2009. As noted above, through the release of documents in the last two years, we now know exactly who was recommended for release, for prosecution or for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, and who, of those latter two categories, was subsequently recommended for Periodic Review Boards, to ascertain whether they should continue to be held.